Confident by Bùi Quý Son (Exutoire) combines furniture design, poetry, public space and performance.

“causer, bouder, (se) confier” a performance by Bùi Quý Son in collaboration with Danja Burchard and Maike Statz.

The performance combined ​​personal thoughts and emotions using the “Confident” hybrid arm-bench, an alternative to the city benches, as site for bodily and affective engagement. The intertwined readings of three texts “Alone,” “Together,” and “Transgression”—all written for the occasion—conveyed an imagination of what trans-normativity looks and feels like in public space.

Confident
As a piece of urban furniture it is intended for new forms of socialization in public space that embrace the transformative, queer nature of kinship. The object takes inspiration from a chair of the same name dating back from 19th-century France, widely known as well as tête-à-tête or vis-à-vis seats whose ambition was to put people in conversation. This reinterpretation proposes to democratize such a former commodity that used to belong in the upper-class living rooms, and bring it out in today’s public space. Confident mixes domesticity with publicness, and questions the homogeneity and clinicality of the urban spaces that surround us. Whether it brings people together or sets them apart, the chair-bench hybrid is a site of investigation on the questions, What makes public space kind, relatable and liberatory? What does trans-normativity look and feel like in public space? 

The performance took place on April 26th at Schouss Plass, Oslo.